During Spring Quarter, the Stanford Arts Institute will be profiling the 2014–15 Honors in the Arts cohort. This interdisciplinary honors program allows students in any major to complete a capstone project integrating arts practice or theory with another field of study, To learn more, visit artsinstitute.stanford.edu/honors.
Senior Jessia Hoffman and Sheila have come a long way. Sheila, her Honors in the Arts capstone project, is a narrative play, which grew from a series of monologues written as Hoffman’s sophomore year Chappell-Lougee project.
Though the original monologues initially sprung from her observations of hookup culture and gendered interaction, Sheila has since strayed into the realm of bodies. Sheila is “an organized collage of the female experience, the composite characters representative of a range of identities,” according to Hoffman. It glimpses into six women’s lives as they perceive and misperceive, treat and mistreat, and interact with bodies. Hoffman noticed the overwhelming number of self-esteem issues stemming from the conception of the body on campus, and recalls body painting for the first time at her co-op, Columbae.
“I looked around in that moment and truly had this thought: Every body was so beautiful,” she said. “That’s just not a sentiment I feel like I and many people here feel often. There’s so much pressure to be perfect, and it extends to our physical bodies.”
I looked around in that moment and truly had this thought: Every body was so beautiful. That’s just not a sentiment I feel like I and many people here feel often. There’s so much pressure to be perfect, and it extends to our physical bodies.”
As part of the examination on the body, Hoffman has one of her characters construct a sculpture of a full-bodied woman on stage, something that becomes meaningful for her and for the other women in the play.
Hoffman also explores gendered interaction in Sheila, something she had begun taking note of in her freshman year. Each of the six women are going through their own personal conflicts, among them an abusive relationship, a Mormon identity, a transgender identity, a breakup from a recently gay boyfriend—all of which circle back to the “female experience.” One particular girl is Sam, who struggles with Crohn’s disease and the resulting colostomy bag from her surgery. Conversations among the women in the play touch upon themes from queerness to religion to alcohol, going beyond the topic of men and effectively acing the Bechdel Test.
“Very few plays I can think of actually deal with illness in youth,” Hoffman said. “I wanted to look at that because there are a number of people physically and mentally ill at some point in their Stanford careers, and yet we so rarely talk about it.”
The characters in Sheila are composites of the students Hoffman interviewed for her Chappell-Lougee monologues. To rework the monologues into a narrative structure, Hoffman worked intensively on changing the characters’ style of speech, striving to capture more accurately the characters’ voices and nuances of conversation, rather than just the characters’ thoughts, as often occurs with monologues.
“There’s something special about seeing yourself, your diction and your mode of being as reflected onstage—we should own the way we talk,” she said.
Hoffman worked intensively on changing the characters’ style of speech, striving to capture more accurately the characters’ voices and nuances of conversation, rather than just the characters’ thoughts, as often occurs with monologues.“There’s something special about seeing yourself, your diction and your mode of being as reflected onstage—we should own the way we talk,” she said.
Though Hoffman has done improv for eight years, and has written poetry and prose as an English major, Sheila is her first play.
“There’s something to be said for working with people, but I really wanted to see if I could write something on my own,” she said.
Throughout the process, she worked on the script through filming herself and improvising with herself. She plans, however, to leave space in the final script for actors to improvise as well, especially after a brief improv session with a draft of the script during winter quarter.
“I’ve learned how much I value collaborative art-making,” Hoffman said. “ It’s so generative when you have multiple people through the process.”
Hoffman will be hosting a staged reading in the Roble Theater at 7 p.m. on May 8 and 9.
